The venerable Mazda CX-9 three-row crossover will get an all-new version late next year, and sources are saying it might pack a diesel engine underhood.
Auto Express reports that the Mazda CX-9 will come to England when the next model bows late next year, at a price around 30,000 pounds ($48,291). It’ll spell the first time the three-row crossover will be sold in the British market. On our side of the Atlantic, it most likely means that we’ll see a new American Mazda CX-9 in late 2013, six and a half years since the first CX-9 was sold.
The Mazda CX-9 has enjoyed relative success during its five-year reign: the model went on sale in March 2007, and sales hit 25,566 units by the end of the year. Oddly enough, the CX-9′s best year on record was 2011, when Mazda sold 34,421 copies of the smiley seven-passenger car. So far this year, sales of the CX-9 are off by about 30 percent compared to the same period in 2011.
With the recent success of the Mazda CX-5 — which is already outselling the CX-7 it will eventually replace — the gauntlet has been set for the larger sibling. To that end, expect the new car to be designed with the full suite of Skyactiv fuel-saving technologies in mind, and expect the new car to get considerably better than the 16 mpg city/22 mpg highway the all-wheel-drive model currently achieves.
There are a number of ways Mazda can achieve this: with a gasoline engine that can replace the current 3.7-liter V-6, or by fitting the new car with a diesel. Considering that Auto Express says the 2014 Mazda CX-9 will be powered by the Skyactiv-D 2.2-liter four-cylinder turbo-diesel in the UK, and that engine is slated to come to the United States around the same time, it’s certainly possible we’ll see a CX-9 diesel. A CX-9 with the Skyactiv-D would be down 100 horsepower relative to the current CX-9′s V-6–173 horses to the 3.7′s 273–but the diesel engine also makes 310 pound-feet of torque, easily dwarfing the 3.7 V-6′s 270 pound-feet. Mazda also estimates that Skyactiv-D delivers 30 percent better fuel economy than a comparable gas engine.
